This invention relates generally to portable, self-contained electronic timekeeping apparatus and in particular to hand-held electronic stopwatches for measuring intervals of elapsed time at horse races and the like.
Many sporting events involve races where the time required for a participant to cover a specified distance or successive distances is measured, recorded and displayed. Horse racing is a familiar example. Often, at race tracks, the elapsed time required for a given horse to reach the one-quarter mile mark, the one-half mile mark, the three-quarters mile mark and the one-mile mark are measured using large, professional timekeeping systems with distributed input stations where an automatic photocell sensor or a human being indicates when a given horse has crossed a particular mark corresponding to a given distance. These times are then recorded and later published in racing forms, where they are studied by the betting public and horse trainers. It would be desirable to have a relatively inexpensive, hand-held stopwatch which members of the betting public and horse trainers could use themselves to successively measure the elapsed time for these four quarter mile intervals, as the race was in progress. Furthermore, at smaller horse farms where expensive electronic equipment for timing a horse as it covers a race course is not available, it would be extremely useful to have such a stopwatch device to assist trainers and spectators to measure the horse's performance and to use for training purposes. In many other sporting events, such as swimming, relay races at track and field meets, auto races and the like, it would similarly be useful to be able to measure and simultaneously display the elapsed times of a particular swimmer, runner or car over several segments, parts or laps of a race course.
Also, in training racing horses or members of a track team, a training session often involves having the racer cover a specified distance (such as one-quarter mile), then rest for a period of time, then run the specified distance again and record the elapsed time, and so on and repeat this process for a total of eight or nine timed intervals. In order to record the several elapsed times for these successive intervals using a conventional stopwatch, it is necessary for the trainer to manually write down the times in a notebook or the like. Recently, a hand-held electronic stopwatch with a single multiple-digit display for measuring two successive back-to-back time periods has become available. This stopwatch requires the user to push a few buttons to recall the first elapsed time which was stored, which is inconvenient and cumbersome. It would be much more useful and convenient to have a stopwatch which could successively measure and record several of the elapsed times required to cover the successive distances without having to push several buttons to recall each of them. It would also be very useful to provide a stopwatch which would simultaneously display several such elapsed times for comparison purposes.
It would also be most useful for trainers and race spectators to have a stopwatch which could provide both of the modes of operation described above and do so interchangeably, simply by pushing one button once or at most a few times. Furthermore, it would be helpful for the stopwatch to indicate in a simple manner the mode it is in and the step in a sequence of steps for measuring multiple intervals of time it is at.
It is the primary object of the present invention to provide a hand-held, self-contained portable stopwatch which can fulfill the foregoing needs. Another object is to provide a hand-held stopwatch which has a plurality of multiple-digit displays and different modes of operation for measuring multiple intervals of time representing the elapsed times a racer has taken to cover successive predetermined distances. It is another object of the present invention to provide a stopwatch of the foregoing type which has a minimum number of operator controls, and which has additional displays that make the stopwatch easy to understand and operate correctly and efficiently.